OneFs and the many clouds

What is the cloud, which is right for you, and why does it matter?

We asked our customers, "When you're looking at the cloud, what are some of the benefits and outcomes that you're looking to achieve? "

And the words they read back to us were things like "agile, "flexible," and "self-service." These are words about people-centric technologies, enabling people to be more productive. Next, they came up with things like "API-driven" and "easy provisioning," which is really about automating the process to helping free up people to be more productive.?Finally, other kinds of words they use are "cost reporting" "on-demand," these are more about financials and driving efficiencies in everything they do.?

Customers are, in essence, saying that they want to automate IT service delivery to drive better productivity of their people while maintaining transparency to the business, and for this to happen, they say they need the public cloud. Unfortunately, customers often make guarantees of spending to the cloud providers in the millions of dollars ahead of moving to the cloud, and many, if not all, face challenges and surprises along the way. Some applications and services work well in the cloud, some become harder, and some are too expensive in the public cloud.

So how can you, as a customer, mitigate this? How can you ensure you move to the right cloud? And if you did make a mistake, how can you minimize the impact and cost of the error?

I work with unstructured data, and these are some of the challenges we often see customers try to solve. It often seems the best solution is to not lock into a single cloud but look at several clouds and pick the best cloud and cloud model for each service or group of services you want to provide. Gartner believes a multi-cloud strategy is critical and has identified it as one of the biggest challenges companies face(1).

Cloud maturity model :?

First, organizations are standing up auto-provisioning and creating automatic processes to standardize infrastructure as a service task, and then they are told to go to a public cloud for burst ability, efficiency, or agility. Then, to be able to dial it up and dial it down as they need.??

Eventually, they realize they want a feature that another cloud provider has, and their current one doesn't, like better analytics services, or they may wish to use multi-vendors for pricing flexibility or move to a new vendor while still spending their existing credits.?

Point of view

If you want success in a cloud-driven world, you need to start with multi-cloud in mind. And this means standardizing on a set of tools as early as possible that will give you the choice and flexibility you need as you diversify your cloud portfolio. To be clear, this provides the organization with flexibility and control over their own IT destiny, whether they run workloads on just a single cloud or a variety of clouds.?

There are benefits to a multi-cloud approach. Organizations viewing the cloud as an operating model release features faster, recover more quickly, and spend less time on security and unplanned work.

As a bonus, employees are happier in organizations that embrace the cloud and less likely to leave.

The great equalizer.

How can the organization utilize the multitude of clouds and ensure they remain agile in adopting the best technology now. Without worrying that what they choose will be obsolete in 12 months and ensure the organization is not stuck with paid credits.

The solution is more straightforward than most would think. All bad things cloudwise start with moving the data. Once data is moved into the cloud, the agility disappears. The ability to select the best solutions is gone. The ability to test other vendors' solutions is gone. And moving data back out is expensive, certainly not something that organizations desire, and not many times.

Dell Technologies has partnered with Faction in a strategy to keep data first, meaning dell technologies help customers move data from their data centers into near cloud datacenters and move the compute resources into the cloud. The customer then can use the software in the cloud of choice and try services from other clouds or switch services when needed, while at the same time not committing to the data sitting with one cloud vendor.

Reach out to your local UDS representative at Dell for more information. If you are not sure who that might be, let me know, and I will point you in the right direction.

(1)Gartner, "Top Challenges Facing I&O Leaders in 2018, and What To Do About Them", March 7, 2018